Why The US Has Turned Against Obama
Michael Barone writes in the Telegraph:

The New Deal historians taught that in times of economic distress, voters will be particularly supportive of, or at least unusually amenable to, a vast expansion of government.

Obama and Democratic congressional leaders, coming to power in the wake of financial crisis and in the midst of a deep recession, acted on this theory. Oddly, Obama deferred almost entirely to the congressional leaders on the details of the legislation. Don't you worry about the small stuff, he seemed to feel; history is on your side.

They passed a $787 billion stimulus package which, not accidentally, increased the baseline budgets of many agencies - a permanent expansion of government. A third of the money went to state and local governments, to spare public employee union members the ravages of the recession that were afflicting everyone else. (Unions, which mostly represent public employees, gave Democrats $400 million in the 2008 campaign cycle.)

...The Obama Democrats gave the theories of the Progressive political scientists and the New Deal historians as much of a fair test as a theory ever gets in our messy, real world. They clearly flunked. One reason is that the history cited in their support is not, in my view, so unambiguously on their side. Yes, voters did give Franklin Roosevelt's Democratic party big majorities in 1934 and 1936 after their New Deal policies seemed to stop the deflationary downward spiral and the economy started growing again.

But FDR's expansion of government did not pull unemployment down below 10 per cent in the 1930s. If you look at polls towards the end of that decade, you see that most Americans felt government was spending too much, that uncertainty about levels of taxation and regulation was stopping entrepreneurs from creating jobs and that the unions had too much power. It is at least arguable that Roosevelt's Democrats were heading for defeat in 1940. Such a defeat was avoided because by November 1940, the Second World War had broken out. Hitler and Stalin were allies, and with their confederates in Italy and Japan were in command of or threatening most of Europe and Asia, with Britain and its empire standing alone against them. In these dire circumstances, voters understandably picked the unflappable Roosevelt over his opponent, a utility executive with no experience of public office.
In other words, in times of economic distress voters do not necessarily support big government policies.

Comments

The American people are agnostic about the size of government, despite their protestations to the contrary. It's not the fact that Obama lost support because of big government policies per se, but because those policies failed to promptly address unemployment. People really like some big government policies; this is why Medicare and Social Security are sacrosanct in our system despite being unaffordable. People by and large like a tough on crime and drugs policy, despite the increasingly intrusive power it grants our police; hence Democrats and Republicans alike compete to see who can be toughest on drugs, and we incarcerate 1 in 100 adults. If the same exact same policies were passed, and we were out of the recession, only the far right would really be complaining about the size of the government, and the pundits would be praising Obama and the Democrats.